Many of the Big Four pioneers were religious non-conformists and social outsiders. A rule-breaking, lumbago-suffering oddball, Samuel ‘Sammy’ Price often found himself in trouble. In 1848 he entered what English law regarded as an incestuous marriage. Emma Nutter Price was his niece – the eldest daughter of his half-brother Thomas. To avoid legal strife in Britain, Samuel and Emma married in Denmark. The marriage produced a daughter, and much consternation. That same year, Price left the firm of Bradley, Barnard & Co. to establish a new partnership with William Edwards. The partnership, unlike the marriage, lasted only a year. In 1849 Price set up business as a partnership of (Location 653)
For labour-intensive accounting firms, troughs in demand are even worse than peaks. The firms deal in staff hours, not in widgets that can be stored as inventory and sold later. Unutilised staff are a dead loss. Apart from the annual cycles, the firms face cycles in overall economic activity and in those service lines that are more strongly tied to booms or recessions. Insolvency specialists, for example, prosper when the rest of the economy does not. How might the firms make the best of the cyclicality? The sale of advice – which is subject to fashions but is intrinsically non-seasonal and non-cyclical – offered a solution. (Location 952)
Tags: consulting, deloitte
For all personnel – not just the ‘sales robots’ – success at selling came to mean success as a Big Four employee. Several national practices adopted the McKinsey ‘8–4–2’ approach. Under that approach, staff at all levels are accountable for targeted levels of sales, billable time and ‘business development’. Specifically, they are expected to be on at least two active assignments, and to have at least four well-advanced proposals in train, and to have at least eight opportunity leads. These expectations are in marked contrast to the early days of Price Waterhouse, in which it was not unusual for a partner to have only one major engagement on the go at any one time. (Location 1497)
I had to fill in a form for my personal development plan. The field where I had to write my ‘personal vision’ permitted a total of twenty characters. My vision was too big. And I felt as though I was the one in the wrong. (Location 1566)
The digital future Digital disruption is a feature of all the likely future scenarios involving the Big Four. So are offshoring, crowdsourcing and remote delivery. Competition from boutiques, micro firms and one-man bands. Standardisation, commoditisation, automation, depersonalisation, disintermediation, routinisation, cannibalisation, stupidification. (Location 2600)